Patch 5.1 - Wrathion Audio
One of the recent PTR builds added audio for the lines we previously posted about for the new Wrathion quest line.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Mote of HarmonyYeah trading them for items is good I guess but for me I don't need money and mainly like the idea of using them for pretty purple items haha. It would be good to have the choice that's all.
When selecting two gathering professions, there is going to be some understanding that you won't be making gold from crafting, at least not on that character. Making them BoP is a good way of showing others that, you as a crafter, have made an awesome item for yourself. If you plan on selling the crafted item, it allows you to raise the value and demand even more of a profit.

As others have mentioned though, there is always a chance they'll become BoA or BoE in the future but no promises. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Conquest Point Cap IncreaseUPDATE: We're aware not all players received the updated Conquest caps with today's maintenance, and we're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Low Difficulty Level of Dungeons
The ability to get in quickly and easily by being automatically matched with other players has a ton of great benefits, including just being able to get in and do dungeons without needing to spend time coordinating a group or spamming chat channels. Plus it has the whole Set It and Forget It benefit of being able to go do stuff while you're in queue. But the ease of entry has a downside in that tolerance goes down, and the fact of a random group is a lack of consistency from run to run. Random players being matched together injects a ton of inconsistency, but if it goes bad you can just jump back into queue and are probably not much worse for the wear.

Cataclysm dungeons tended to require things like CC, and in general a fairly in-sync and coordinated group to be consistently successful (at least until enough people outgeared them). The problem comes when matching random players together that there is no consistency. While you may go in with a group and all learn something, that a specific mob needs to be CC'd, or a certain boss behavior to avoid a wipe, those lessons are more than likely out the window with the next group you're matched with. While you may have some knowledge, maybe no one else does, and most people don't want to spend every run waiting for everyone else to learn all those same lessons. That can just be a frustrating experience. So instead of trying to force a group of strangers to be so heavily coordinated (maybe even having to jump into voice chat) just to complete the first steps of progression, we reduce the complexity to a point where the random groups that are being put together can most of the time be successful without needing to be hyper-organized or educated on each pull. Instead, that organization is far more important for the organized content where random people aren't matched together: normal and Heroic raids.

Of course there are players that want every piece of content to be very challenging, even going so far as wanting hard questing and daily quests, but the breadth of types of people playing World of Warcraft mean that we need to have a wide variety of content, and a wide variety of difficulty, to try to appeal to a variety of tastes. Obviously it's not an exact science, as you'll see from expansion to expansion, or even patch to patch, we may change difficulty to suit what we believe will achieve the best results for the people attempting that content. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warrior Damage in PvP
So this video has been getting around a lot lately, showing up in many different threads so let us just make this the main one for its discussion

Yeah, because clearly you should be expecting a 200k+ HC strike. I'm sorry, but there's no way you can anticipate this kind of damage as it's completely RNG and you're dead before you can react.
Actually, in a way you can. If you monitor the Warriors buffs, you will be able to see the number of Taste for Blood (TFB) stacks that are building up and this is can indicate when the cooldowns are going to be popped and the big damage is incoming. So this allows you to be prepared for when they jump onto you and you can use your defensive cooldowns. Please understand that we are in no way saying that this damage is fine, but it does take a lot of work for a Warrior to do this and can be predicted.

I know that the theory is not the same as in practice and keeping constant tabs on the Warriors TFB stacks is not always possible. The main point that needs to be mentioned though is that the cooldowns you can see being blown in this video on their own, while a major damage increase, is not substantial enough to global a player unless used in conjunction with several stacks of TFB to create a HUGE Heroic Strike critical.

For a Warrior to build up enough stacks to global a player like seen in this video, they need a incredible amounts of up time to make sure the stacks of TFB do not fall off before getting a new one. To make it clearer, in 15 seconds they need to get a new stack of TFB and then repeat that, hoping their stacks do not fall off before the buff expires. Four or five TFB stacks are generally needed to pull off the Heroic Strike damage you see in the video on a well geared player and because of the changes in 5.1 these stacks while still possible to build, will not be as easy to get as they are now.

The main change that does this is the one to Avatar, which removes movement impairing effects rather than making you immune to them, this is because your up-time will not be nearly as high. This means that while you may very rarely still see a large Heroic Strike like this because someone is good enough or the Warrior is facing someone who is struggling to keep their distance, they will be less common. If a Warrior is good enough to build those stacks though, you can anticipate the incoming damage by watching their TFB stacks.

So this change to Avatar lowers two key issues with Warriors, mobility and burst and the Gag Order change helps with their control. Do not think that these change makes Warriors too controllable or weak in Arena, they will simply no longer be able to stick to a target constantly and build up TFB stacks, then afterwards global a player.

''Warriors – We don’t think Warrior burst is out of control'' - Ghostcrawler. What do you mean? Ghostcrawler told us that Warrior burst is fine! How dare you go against his divine will!
I never said that Warrior burst was not fine. I just said that the 230K crit you see here is a lot of damage and that we are not implying that this much damage from one skill is fine.

If you pop all defenses possible as healer on yourself the thing that a warrior does is switching target and hitting the other person full in the face.
The Warrior only has one chance with their TFB. What I meant was that if you see those TFB stacks and the Warrior pops his cooldowns, if your reactions are good you can make him waste the TFB stacks. If they use up those TFB stacks on someone with their defensive cooldowns, the switch they make after is not all that scary.

Not taking your words out of context here, but a warrior takes a lot of work to get TFB stacks to 5? That's like doing the lottery and winning, saying it's "a lot of work".

It's RNG, simple as that, and to win games off of the back of RNG and RNG alone, is not something that should have even made it live, seeing as it's an intended mechanic and not a bug that was overshadowed on the Beta.

That fight lasts about 30seconds, maye a little more? So difficult to prevent! So easy to anticipate! Just stop the warrior...
I never denied the fact that it was RNG and yes, there can be times where this happens. While you are strongly suggesting that it makes it easy to get, I would argue with. If luck is in your favor you can indeed get the stacks on your first try five times in a row, but the chance of that happening is 0.243% so I would consider the clip you linked a freak occurrence. In general though, it is something that requires you to be stuck to your target and trying many times to get to several stacks of TFB. And again, while not always possible but can help, monitoring the warriors buffs can let you know when this damage is incoming and the changes in patch 5.1 will make it harder for a Warrior to stick to a target and get those TFB stacks. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

LFR FeedbackWhat an enormous spit in the face of every guild that tries their best but just isn't world first material. To hear this from a Blizzard employee...You heard it people, Blizzard doesn't consider you competitive unless you're Paragon or Method.

What about competition on a realm? Competition between guilds of similar amount of raiding days/raid philosophy? Between people in a guild? Competition between players of the same class on a realm? Competition on WoL? Are they less important because it's not about world firsts?
There are varying levels of competitiveness. The folks playing at a local club are competitive. But on a different level (of skill, most often) than professional players. This is kind of the same, there are competitive guilds out there that just can't perform at the level of world first guilds. Are they less important? No.

But coming here and saying that you need to do all this because you are competitive and complaining about it's just weird. That's why it's called competition. You need to edge your opposition one way or the other. There are many ways to gear up these days, and you don't need to use them all, but of course, if you do, you'll gear up quicker.

Asking, in consequence, to shut down those things you don't want to do (and therefore reduce the quality of this game) just because you don't want to use those venues cannot be seen as a benefit (especially by the players that do use those).

Of course, in a world where you compete against other guilds, folks using those venues will most likely progress faster than you in the same timeframe, that's competition. And that's part of choosing which playstyle you want to pursue. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Gearing up an OffspecIs there still quests to get at 90 that give gear, or is it only dailies from now on? Should I just run through dungeons and hope that no one needs the gear for their main spec?
First of all, there's a gear vendor at Townlong Steppes that may come in handy: Supplier Xin (at Longying outpost) sells green 408 items for gold, so if you have DPS gear that's still below that, you can go and pick upgrades there.

Activision Blizzard Q3 2012 Earnings Call on November 7
The Q3 2012 Earnings call will take place on November 7, at 1:30 PM PST, which brings us an update on subscriber numbers for the third quarter of 2012. The Mists of Pandaria Launch Press release from a few days after Q3 ended stated that they were back over 10 million subscribers again, a gain of 900,000 since Q2.

Warcraft Elections
Blizzard is held their own elections today for new faction leaders!

On the stormy shores of Azeroth,
A silhouette did stand.
A brave and stalwart sailor
Who gave a helpin' hand.
Without fail, on every whim,
Which we did demand,
He simply smiled and waved his hand,
And sent us 'cross the land.

They should make the Warcraft election be 18+ only like the U.S. one. That way, Sha of Happiness would only get like 3% (there's always those guys... you know who they are). Then, we could have another election. I'm thinking of writing in Scourge Haunt (the ghost from Haunted Memento), Shademaster Kiryn, and Millhouse Manastorm. I can picture it now: "2012 was merely a setback!"

It's good we're getting more because we'd eventually blow through our Lesser Charm stockpile in 2-3 months. Who would want to do 70ish dailies a week just for the coins and some VP when we're exalted with everything?

Also expecting at least a 500k increase. Annual Pass was still in effect and a new expansion. Can't be better. We also got one of those 5 dollar WoW sales again that seem to pop up a lot towards the end of quarters.

They should make the Warcraft election be 18+ only like the U.S. one. That way, Sha of Happiness would only get like 3% (there's always those guys... you know who they are). Then, we could have another election. I'm thinking of writing in Scourge Haunt (the ghost from Haunted Memento), Shademaster Kiryn, and Millhouse Manastorm. I can picture it now: "2012 was merely a setback!"

Who are you to say those that voted for the Sha of Happiness aren't 18+?